The exploration of the mysteries of harmony that began in the sixteenth century has much in common with the exploration of the real world with the help of the natural sciences and critical thinking. Similarly, the journeys into the most remote key areas were only possible after composers had learned to look behind the rigid system of modes and hexachords and began to see the sheer unlimited possibilities of transposition and modulation. Since these harmonic experiments were long considered a secret art, it is no surprise that they were confined to solo keyboard instruments, where chords and their progressions could be handled by the ten fingers of the two hands and where the composer and the performer were often the same person. Yet at first the keyboard with its preset and fixed tuning allowed excursions into remote key areas only to a limited degree. As a consequence, adjustments to the old Pythagorean tuning were necessary, and this led to various forms of mean-tone and irregular temperament culminating in the establishment of equal temperament in the early nineteenth century.

J. S. Bach’s monumental double cycle of The Well-tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) has always been regarded as a major landmark in the history of keyboard music and the utilization of the full spectrum of keys. The first part, containing preludes and fugues through all twenty-four major and minor keys, was completed in 1722; the second, of the same scope, followed around 1739/40. Although The Well-tempered Clavier is often associated with the use of equal temperament, we know from various documents that Bach – like most of his contemporaries – actually favored a pragmatic temperament that made playing in remote tonal areas possible but at the same time kept the variegation of the individual keys. The unique artistic value of Bach’s double cycle lies not merely in the comprehensive treatment of this key system, but rather in the idea of combining the richness of harmonies he explores with an equally comprehensive richness of musical styles and composing techniques.

Bach drew his inspiration from various models – some of which will be introduced 22-27 June 2014 during the keyboard program presented by Andreas Staier and Peter Wollny at the thirteenth-century Royaumont Abbey north of Paris. One of the earliest journeys through the key areas is taken in John Bull’s Fantasia Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, which leads a simple diatonic subject set in a strictly contrapuntal fashion by means of transposition through a labyrinth of harmony. Another way of exploring the spectrum of keys is the free improvisatory style called stylus phantasticus in the seventeenth century. A fine example of this type of composing is Georg Böhm’s Praeludium, Fuga et Postludium in G minor, a piece transmitted in a manuscript copy from Bach’s circle.

Bach and his German contemporaries devoted much of their compositional efforts to adapting and merging the French and Italian national styles. Thus Bach studied and held in high esteem the works of Antonio Vivaldi and François Couperin. The combination of German, Italian and French elements eventually yielded the highly expressive and galant mixed style that became the great composer’s legacy to his sons and students.

Pianist Joanna MacGregor heads, Rapunzel-like, to the top of a tower and stares out across to where the pebbled lips of the coastline kiss the slate blue waters of the English Channel. Here she will stay for hours, because this is where she keeps her Steinway; safely out of earshot “which is really important for the neighbors.” You’d think in the seaside town of Brighton that the locals would be queuing up to hear her perform on a daily basis (without having to shell out), but clearly MacGregor is as anxious as the rest of us when it comes to maintaining diplomatic relations with the residents in her street.

She is busy preparing for her latest globetrotting tour, which will take in Portugal and New Zealand, before she arrives in Melbourne for the Metropolis New Music Festival. It might be a celebration of the contemporary, but of course MacGregor will be playing Bach – almost three hundred years dead but still sounding deliciously “modern.” The innovative pianist might be known for casting her net wide in search of distinctive collaborations, but Bach is never far behind. The ”new music” part comes from the presence of Shostakovich, Messiaen and English composer Harrison Birtwistle, whose pieces are interwoven throughout the program.

Like a giddy journey in a time-machine through collisions of era and continent, her concert program begins in Germany during the Baroque period before heading east to a chilly Soviet Union followed by a hook turn through France, then back to a thawed-out Russia via Britain. She finishes in Buenos Aires with Four, for Tango from the master of the bandoneon, Astor Piazzolla.”Yes, I suppose it is quite a journey,” she laughs. “I hadn’t really thought of it that way.”

It all starts with a handful of Bach’s now-famous preludes and fugues – the Old Testament of keyboard repertoire – made up of forty-eight short pieces in every key imaginable, from which she segues into Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues. But don’t be deceived by the somewhat pedagogical title. Wrapped up in each of these little pieces, only a few minutes long, is an entire musical world in microcosm where fiery toccatas, ceremonial entrances, operatic arias meet comic moments and tragic dramas.

How Shostakovich, who found Bach “boring,” came to emulate his iconic keyboard work is, says MacGregor, a classic Cold War tale. Sent against his will as a cultural ambassador to Leipzig in 1950, the composer found himself morosely sitting on the jury of the first international Bach Competition. But his ears pricked up when a Russian pianist sat down and played from The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93), as the Bach collection is known. Impressed, he returned to Moscow and penned twenty-four of his own. “It’s interesting how the two hundred years between the composers completely dissolves when you play them,” says MacGregor. “I do a little trick at the end when I play two Shostakovich fugues, one after the other, and then finish with Bach. By then the audience shouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”

Maybe, but when it comes to the crunch, which does she prefer? “Bach,” she says without missing a beat. “He’s the main man. With a lot of Western music it all goes back to Bach. All the harmonic progressions and techniques are absolutely watertight. You can’t get away from him. He’s like a godfather in a mafia way. He’s just there and present in everything.”

In keeping with this year’s festival theme, the natural world, she has selected a number of works that revolve around birds. Hot on the heels of the winged medley comes works by Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, innocently entitled Musical Toys, which, she says, like the best fairy tales, are a perfect mix of enchantment and fear.

MacGregor has spent her life nudging classical music into new territories and has collaborated with the likes of jazz musician and composer Django Bates, Talvin Singh, the father of modern Asian electronic music, and the French pianist, composer and writer, Pierre Boulez. In line with her determination to dismantle musical barriers, she also runs her own record label, SoundCircus.

Her drive towards the eclectic and intuitive modus operandi comes, perhaps, from not having been hot-housed as a child. Despite being the daughter of a piano teacher, MacGregor says she never felt pressure to practice; there were no Tiger Mother schedules to uphold. “Playing for me is as natural as breathing. To be a musician, you have to have a desire to listen and explore music. If you are one of those kids who are forced to practice you end up utterly miserable.” At the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she is head of piano, there are only a handful of students who have been hot-housed. “What you are looking for in young people . . . is this absolute natural response and enthusiasm and ebullience when they hear music, rather than cracking the whip.”

It is time for MacGregor to head back up the tower to revisit those tonal universes of the preludes and fugues or to recapture the trills and ornamental chirrups of Couperin’s birds. She does so with a cheerful heart. “It’s all so enjoyable, I can’t think of anything better.”

“That certain artists and composers are of the same generation doesn’t always mean that there is a significant link between them. But Goya and Beethoven share the sense of being possessed by inner demons. They also share an awareness of humanity at its most squalid and disreputable – particularly in the context of war,” observes Sir John Eliot Gardiner. A revolutionizing exponent of the music of Claudio Monteverdi and Johann Sebastian Bach as well as Ludwig van Beethoven, Mr. Gardiner is the founding music director of the Monteverdi Choir and the period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. Having discovered his profound interest in relationships between art and music during an informal conversation [last] year, I arranged for us to resume this discussion at London’s National Gallery.

Our conversation touched on Mr. Gardiner’s forthcoming book on Bach, scheduled for British publication [in] September [of 2013]. “It’s less a conventional biography,” he explains, “than a series of fourteen contextualizing approaches to Bach through the music.” For instance, one chapter explores “the family ramifications and what it meant to be a Bach, while comparing Europe’s parallel musical dynasties at the time: the Bachs in Germany, the Scarlattis in Italy, the Bendas of Bohemia and the Couperins in France. Another chapter . . . investigates Bach’s relationship to Martin Luther and the complexity of the religious element in Bach’s music. And on it goes.”

Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther’s close friend and portraitist, is a painter Mr. Gardiner identifies with Bach. “Cranach is so much part of Lutheran iconography that he’s an inescapable part of Bach’s heritage, and Bach must have been introduced to his work during his years in Weimar, where Cranach’s house still stands.”

Cranach’s Cupid Complaining to Venus (c. 1525) uses pagan imagery to present a Lutheran moral that Bach would have recognized. The winged child of the goddess of love protests being stung by bees while stealing a honeycomb. A Latin inscription in the upper right reads, “life’s pleasure mingled with pain.”

“I always feel the plague and the Dance of Death hovering in the background of Cranach’s work,” Mr. Gardiner says. “And death plagued Bach throughout his life. He was orphaned at nine, and as an adult lost ten or eleven of his twenty-three children, not to mention his first wife. Bach so wonderfully evokes the concept of the Dance of Death in his Easter cantata, Christ lag in Todesbanden (BWV 4), based on Martin Luther’s eponymous hymn of the Resurrection and the struggle between life and death.”

The Supper at Emmaus

Related to this theme, Caravaggio‘s powerfully emotional The Supper at Emmaus (1601) is a painting whose resonance, for Mr. Gardiner, embraces Bach, Beethoven and Caravaggio’s contemporary Monteverdi. Caravaggio depicts the post-Crucifixion episode, in St. Luke, when an apparent stranger sups at an inn with two of Christ’s disciples. As he blesses the bread, the disciples recognize him as Christ. To the two disciples Caravaggio adds a bemused innkeeper.

“By means of sharp light and shadow, gesture and illusion, Caravaggio re-creates the sheer wonderment of a miracle. At the center is this beardless, tranquil stranger whose hand raised in benediction almost reaches out beyond the canvas to the viewer. The two disciples react so differently to their sudden awareness – the one on the right with his outstretched arms seems ready to embrace Christ. The disciple on the left stares at Christ’s face and is ready to spring from his chair in astonishment and joy. Meanwhile the puzzled innkeeper can’t understand what’s going on.”

The disciples’ excited gestures are those of everyday people, I note. The whole composition embodies realistic shock. Everything around the calm central figure is off-balance; shadows are exaggerated as if caused by a flash of light, a fruit basket teeters at the table’s edge. Hands balloon out of proportion – fingertips oversized, arms foreshortened. Caravaggio confronts us with a silent emotional explosion that transcends even the most eloquent speech.

“You certainly find this emotion in Monteverdi,” Mr. Gardiner says. “Consider the moment in his opera L’Orfeo, when Orfeo learns of Euridice’s death and responds with a single word, the soft, anguished cry, ‘Ohimè (Alas).’ Yet over a century after Monteverdi’s day, Caravaggio’s emotion resonates strongly in Bach’s cantatas for the second and third days of Easter, especially the wonderful Road to Emmaus, Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden (BWV 6). And this epochal, iconoclastic work anticipates Beethoven, indeed all those subversive composers who would not follow the rules.”

Much the same resourcefulness and quickness of mind that characterize the Italian period-instrument ensemble Europa Galante’s performances of Baroque music evidently carry over into the way violinist Fabio Biondi’s vibrant group conducts its business affairs.

When Hurricane Sandy forced the cancellation of numerous flights out of New York City earlier this week, including one Biondi and friends were to have taken from LaGuardia to O’Hare to fulfill their concert engagement at the University of Chicago, they snapped into action, renting two cars that enabled them to safely reach their destination, some eight hundred miles away.

The touring contingent of five musicians presented one of the first classical concerts in the Performance Hall of the new Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts on Tuesday evening. This was the first collaboration between the Latino Music Festival and the University of Chicago Presents concert series.

Europa Galante and the physical and acoustical intimacy of the center’s handsome new, 474-seat concert room proved a felicitous match.

So good is the sound, in fact, that the instrumentalists – playing violins, cello, theorbo (lute) and harpsichord – always were warmly yet clearly “present,” even in passages where Biondi, who led the performances from the violin, took dynamics down to a whisper.

With an acoustical design overseen by the Chicago firm Kirkegaard Associates, the hall has adjustable acoustical drapes that make it suitable for everything from speech to music. Its beautiful, wood-paneled interior and comfortable, terraced setting are further advantages. This is a wonderful boon for an area that has lacked a chamber music and recital hall with first-rate acoustics for music: a performance space that sounds as beautiful as it looks. I can’t wait to hear other classical artists, local and visiting, perform here.

Tuesday’s program showed the fluid interchange of musical styles and influences among Italian, Spanish and French musicians active in the Baroque era. The virtuosic violin playing of Biondi was one common denominator. Each half of the concert was anchored by a different set of variations on the familiar Baroque form known as the folia (or follia, as it was known in Italy).

A lesser group performing both Arcangelo Corelli’s sonata La Follia and Antonio Vivaldi’s Trio Sonata in D minor, which is based on the same Baroque greatest hit, might court musical overkill, but not Europa Galante. Biondi’s violin playing was both finely poised and electric in both works: full of energy, but never aggressively so, always elegant of phrasing and refined of tone.

His colleagues in the Corelli – Antonio Fantinuoli, cello; Giangiacomo Pinardi, theorbo; and Paola Poncet, harpsichord – had plenty of opportunities to shine on their own, which they seized on with comparable zestiness. In the Vivaldi, Biondi and violinist Andrea Rognoni engaged in dueling bursts of passage work, yet never did their quick tempos bring a sense of scrambling. One could not fail to appreciate the subtlety and grace of Biondi’s melodic embellishments.

The five players brought further refinements of phrasing and articulation to Francois Couperin’s trio sonata Parnassus, or the Apotheosis of Corelli, a charming homage from one master to another. Typically Biondi would make a sudden swell or fade, giving the line a quick dramatic jolt that always felt in character with the French style.

Much the same rhythmic vitality and lucidly articulated and balanced textures that marked the readings heard earlier also animated works by the more obscure composers Michele Mascitti, an Italian who gained fame at the French court in the early eighteenth century; Francisco Jose de Castro, a Spanish nobleman and musical amateur who worked in Brescia, Italy; and Jose Herrando (1680-1763), the leading Spanish violinist of his day.

Both Mascitti’s violin sonata Psyche and Herrando’s Sonata for violin and basso continuo are delightfully programmatic works, the former depicting the mythic love story of Psyche and Eros, the latter evoking the birds and other natural sounds of the Spanish royal palace gardens at Aranjuez. Biondi and friends tossed off all the chirpy, stormy sound effects with conspicuous panache. The same held true for their account of Castro’s trio sonata Trattenimento, which had the two violins intertwining in flourishes reflecting Corelli’s stylistic influence on the young Spaniard.

The encores consisted of some battle music by one Marco Cellini and Jean-Marie Leclair’s Tambourin.

Bach’s biographer Johann Nicolaus Forkel, who was often critical of French music and musicians, judged the French composers whom Bach studied to have been “masters of harmony and fugue.” Although he did not list these composers, we know that Bach copied music by Grigny, d’Anglebert and Dieupart and arranged a portion of L’Impériale from Couperin’s Les Nations to createthe Aria in F Major (BWV 587). Bach’s interest in French music is especially evident in his English and French Suites (BWV 806-811 and 812-817) and Overtures (BWV 820 and 831), and French practices can be detected in at least one of his organ works.

Bach’s Fantasia in G Major (BWV 572) makes reference to the French style in several ways. The French title, Pièce d’orgue, is given to it in several sources, and its three movements are also titled in French: Très vitement, Gravement, Lentement. It includes a low B pedal note that would have been found only in the extended compass of French organs en ravalement, and the work has a middle section in five voices that appear to correspond to the two violin, two viola and violone instrumentation preferred by French composers for the string orchestra. It is likely that the Fantasia was composed in Weimar, about ten years after Bach had first encountered the French style in Lüneburg.

Boulder Bach Festival music director and organist Rick Erickson will perform the Fantasia in G Major at a Benefit Concert at 6:30pm on 24 May 2012 at First Congregational Church in Boulder.